brushes his hair to keep it pretty
There is something particular about memories combined with sounds and sensations. With smells and visuals. Something that could trigger them at any moment when only the mind was so willing to overcome a barrier placed without acknowledgement of its invisible construction. Something buried deep within jumbled thoughts, like the end of a maze found when getting lost while running further and further without any want and need to find the true end of it all. It was perhaps a place to leave something there. To place a secret, a treasure, where none could truly find it, where none were supposed to, none allowed to be aware of it - a little gem in a little box - but if one were to truly think about, this small secret could encompass it all.
Something wonderful. Or something horrible.
Sometimes, it would be enough to break it all down within that gentle movement of hands through fine and barely tangled hair. With fingertips parting ways in those endless waves of fine and shimmery tresses, slowly, as if to make sure that no discomfort would befall him where he knew none would ever be able to find him. It was a peculiar way of interacting with him: to catch the Quincy in that moment of wanted dissociation from the world and everybody around them, just for those few little instances that could drag an ever-turning, ever-churning mind of attention away from whatever order he had yet to fulfil, while artfully crafting that very picture of white noise - in the way hands would grasp for a strand again and again. In the way the chosen brush would glide through it, attentively making sure not a single spot would be missed.
It is a sound everybody knew. It is a sort of white noise that could quell whatever tumultuous and tempestuous idea would rummage through his thoughts and allow a margin of calm to befall him. It is a sound one might yet want to learn how to describe without the obvious, and one Jugram had grown quite fond of over the years he had allowed Lovek to be as close as this to him.
And it was a sound that triggered a found little recollection of something similar. Burnt out into barely of a shape, a bare reminder of a form somewhere in the depths of his memory, a fleeting little glimpse of a past that should be closed off and hidden. Forgotten as it was; for nothing like this were to ever come back. It rages a picture of a burning forest, a burning little town in the middle of nowhere when only ever his history had repeated itself and the Grandmaster's reaction to it all had been just as empty, just as devoid as the sheer abundance of anger boiling in another forlorn one's face the very night it had happened. It were two memories, now that it had settled on drawing it all out.
Both burning. Both screaming. One was older than the other. [ one was his dearest friend's village? the other was his own---? ] He had seen and thought and felt that before, this anger - but it was not there anymore.
Now? Now when his head would shake for a bit in trying to rid himself of the strain put under for holding so still, so unknowingly still under mild and careful ministrations, it was enough for him to breathe out a laugh.
What a weird thing to happen at that moment, underneath bright skies, shimmering in clear blues. Sitting here in the castle's courtyard, amongst lush greens and verdant, bright and untouched by servants who had not yet come to disturb them both. " Having fun? " It was a mild little display of a realisation that Lovek had begun humming a tune of - at least as much as he was able to bring up the want to recall - a song played at one of the balls only days prior. Something he had found rather discordant and loud, yet for one of his closest ones, it had struck a fancy. Ah, he would not deny such [ his Majesty had said the same if he recalls? ]. Merely making to turn his head for just a bit, glancing at her with a raised eyebrow.
He could see the smile. Hear the laugh. It was easy to realise that despite what his companion had set out to do, desirable had been something else. But who could truly wonder about it? He had listened to the servants here and there whispering and murmuring about their desires to get their hands on him for once, to adorn his hair with bejewelled accessories, to mayhaps braid it - just like the Emperor's aide had done so now in numerous little interlinked and interloped creations. One more bold and bigger than some of the others, now all that may be left for a finishing touch, was to fasten the cascade of hair with a silken thread.
No missing awareness that this was the next wish, and nothing more but a sigh would leave him when Lovek's work had been done. So much for just wishing to brush his hair, but who was he to complain? Thus do hands find his caregiver's; a brush of fingertips in regard to feeling whatever intricately conducted masterpiece now set to embellish his form and in a sense? Yes, there was a breaking, a burning, knowledge that something like this had been his everyday occurrence so many - such uncountable - years ago.
But it does not matter, anymore. " Thank you. I appreciate it. " @adenial đ